The following story is correlated to the third track:
It will have been 6 months or so since I woke up in this timeline.
Honestly I have not yet been able to cultivate the habit of recording the days since I am staying in the recharge region. An artificial archipelago at some latitude above the equator riddled with solar panels.
Here, the sun goes down only when it is impossibly necessary.
This is because the machine managed to find a way to alter the earth's rotation.
It cared little for destroying the odd building or overflowing the oceans in the process.
Not a single one of the wonders built by humans survived. Neither Machu Picchu, nor Chichen itza, Petra was swallowed up by the earth and so on...
The world is now divided by utilitarian regions, here for example only lithium is mined and treated.
There is no other activity that is not related to the charging and recycling of batteries.
This region is made up of nothing more than platforms over small ocean water passages intended for cooling.
The channels dividing the large metal boxes have a fast and powerful current.
The beams that emerge from deep in the water constantly have to be repaired as the pressure of the currents itself mistreats them.
A metal jungle where adrenaline is constantly in the air, even in the smallest actions such as standing upright.
That is why the Nemesis -the facto-hybrid race that inhabits this region- are endowed with spectacular reflexes, the hyperbolic ability to maintain balance and the capacity to plan the perfect route taking into account an enormity of random factors.
They carry a personality based on pragmatism and efficiency, they are analytical and calculating.
They detest ambiguities and margin for error.
In case you were wondering, this is one of the few facto-hybrid species that enjoy the privileges necessary for their autonomous development.
They can remove and add parts depending on what the situation demands and better calibrate their genetic mutations to achieve perfect balance and aerodynamics.
This privilege was granted to them because they are researching how to extend their lifespan. They currently make up for this lack of longevity with an inscrutably high reproduction rate.
They multiply second by second but at the same rate they die from problems related to their circulatory system.
They are efficient and precocious even in the decomposition of their corpse.
Once dead, the body of the nemesians instantly separates all its liquid mass to bring pressure to the cooling currents and its solid matter is pulverized and evaporated to release the platform as quickly as possible and not interfere with the circulation of its consanguineous.
A Nemesis, as this species was named after the Greek goddess of balance, is constantly testing more than a trillion different upgrades per second to find its perfect version. The one that allows it not only to improve its useful life, but also to maintain the same or higher productivity than its current version.
That is why within the same capacity spectrum we can find nemesians with different limitations and skills. They are among the most dynamic and heterogeneous species of all.
I was able to take refuge among them on the recommendation of Teca, the anthropomorph who welcomed me to this panorama some time ago.
Teca knew of the passive discontent that the nemesians had, a discontent that had been growing since they gained their evolutionary privileges. The Nemesis understood that they were working for a system that was increasingly bending their needs and exhausting their resources. Gradually, very slowly, with 500 years of handicap.
But for the nemesians, the very idea of something having a predictable end was slightly bitter. Like drinking a glass of water to cover their hunger.
Therefore, they would never waste their almost non-existent time reporting any incident involving a human. That would require being visited by a bunch of investigators and they were exhausted by formal protocols.
I was like a pet to them, I'm not ashamed to admit.
I had to optimize my survival, too.
I got to know a bit more about the Bytes or the founders.
To my surprise, they were all people contemporary to the time I remembered, names not worth even suggesting.
Remembering why our entire ecosystem was groped does nothing but churn my guts and stimulate my heartburn.
This all happened when the race stopped being about money and started being about power.
It began when our technology had advanced enough to understand that extra-planetary civilizations had defined us as an uroboros, a civilization set to fail.
I won't go into details, simplistically, they had sealed off a couple of parsecs along with other planets and kept us in a fishbowl.
A fishbowl that from my perspective was abysmally huge, but for them it is a tiny space in the living room of some family home.
We knew it as the universe. They knew it as 'IDS' (impenetrable delimited space).
It was basically a club of losers that we were part of along with the rest of the solar system and a couple of other galaxies.
As a consolation prize we were the only society that reinvented itself and prolonged its existence.
In short, the existence of the machine regime had been born out of nothing more than ego.
The powerful people of what was once the world in which they lived could not tolerate discovering that they were just another grain of sand.
Although I do not deny that it was all a complex work of engineering; I cannot even attribute it to them with respect.
Our planet was inside a fishbowl in some intergalactic museum of which we barely understood a bit of its concept.
All this combined with the millions of upgrades allowed the nemesians to develop increasingly complex emotions. Their pessimism was the perfect breeding ground for them to find my charisma and human effusiveness charmingly intoxicating.
Eventually I went from being their pet, to coordinating the entire archipelago with the approval of the entire species.
It turned out to be very easy; machine learning is always by a reward system, so they only recorded what they thought was rewarding to listen to. All the bad jokes or witticisms were forgotten when they died and did not transcend their cognitive core.
I sin of vanity in admitting an advantage over the machine.
It is true that I have had to be rescued millions of times to keep me from dying because I am incapable of mastering the platforming environment, if I had to move by my own abilities from one side of the platform to the other I would be dead by now.
But the amazing thing was to have made up for all my physical handicaps by talking.
The promise I made to help them with the running of the factories was broken the second they saw me trying to load lithium from a mine to a packer. They found it cute and endearing and concluded that it was rewarding to have me on board.
I don't think they have the cognitive structure to develop admiration or any similar feelings. But I can swear to you that we have built a similar code to interpret and consider a logical approximation of that feeling.
